BlackRock now owns 80% of Meta's $14B El Paso data center, and Moody's says the AI spending spree threatens credit quality. Plus: a night in Texas with an excavator that drives itself.

THE EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS

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Fully autonomous excavators are closer than you think. After a day on the ground with Bedrock Robotics in Texas, the operators closest to these machines are the ones most relieved to see them coming.

BlackRock now owns 80% of Meta's $14 billion El Paso data center, with roughly 90 cents of every dollar borrowed. Meta becomes the anchor tenant of its own campus, and the question of who your ultimate client is just changed.

Four hyperscalers reported in the same fortnight and got opposite verdicts. Microsoft added $450 billion in a single day, the biggest one-day gain any company has recorded, while Alphabet and Meta both fell on the same spending story.

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I spent last week at a 1,200-acre testing ground in Lockhart, Texas, watching an excavator dig with nobody in the cab, and two days after I got back, BlackRock took an 80% stake in a $14 billion Meta data center while Moody's told six of the biggest technology companies on earth that their spending has grown large enough to threaten their own credit ratings. All three converge on the same question: who actually owns the infrastructure this AI boom is standing on?

Bedrock Robotics, founded by a team of Waymo veterans including Kevin Peterson, Bedrock's CTO, does not build new excavators. It takes the excavators a contractor already owns and fits them with sensors and a computer, which I think of as installing a very good operator into the machine you already have. 

Bedrock's proving ground sits at Proto-Town, a 1,200-acre site near Lockhart, Texas, where deep-tech firms test equipment that does not fit anywhere else. I walked the site with Steven, an army veteran who moved from operating excavators to overseeing Bedrock's crews, and he told me the industry's veteran operators are heading for retirement with no queue behind them. The Associated Builders and Contractors puts the industry's 2026 workforce need at 349,000 net new workers, rising to 456,000 in 2027, on top of all normal hiring.

Trey, Champion Site Prep's CEO, is one of the contractors closest to this technology today, and against that backdrop, fully autonomous excavators are closer to real jobsites than most of the industry expects. Kevin and I stress tested the safety system on camera by walking toward a working excavator until it froze, instantly, a few centimeters from the bucket's reach. It is one machine class, and much of what I saw runs at a closed test facility. But it works, and it earns money today. The people closest to these autonomous machines are not the ones campaigning against them.

Meta and BlackRock announced a venture on Tuesday to develop and own a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, with fourteen billion dollars in development costs and one gigawatt of capacity behind it. The structure underneath those two numbers matters more than either of them.

Funds managed by BlackRock own 80% of the venture. Meta keeps the remaining 20%, leases back the entire campus, and runs it, which makes Meta the anchor tenant of its own data center. The money underneath breaks down like this:

Most of the $14 billion used to build this campus came from borrowed money.

Similar structures have formed around Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI over the past year, and El Paso is the cleanest version yet of what looks like the template. The numbers on the ground are real: 2,300 people are already on site, rising to 4,000 at peak, with 300 permanent roles when the campus opens in 2028, and BlackRock is separately putting about $30 million into training 12,000 electricians, which is not the kind of line-item asset managers usually carry.

Meta has also given residual value guarantees on the campus worth around $13 billion, tapering over time, and the risk has shifted onto a balance sheet the two companies now share. One of them calls this a de-risked pipeline that finally allows pension money to own data centers. The other camp faces the debt: when roughly 90 cents of every dollar is borrowed, a debt-funded pipeline runs the risk of shutting down faster than it would in a normal downturn. The smaller contractor is asking the trickier question, which is whether any of the $14 billion reaches the regional trades or stays with the megafirms and their preferred supply chains.

Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, the four biggest data center customers in the world, all reported results over the past two weeks, and if your backlog has data center work in it, these earnings calls are the closest thing to a credit check on your client.

Moody's got there first, calling the AI spending unprecedented in a July 24 note that said it threatens the credit quality of six firms: Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, and CoreWeave. It projects those six will spend $785 billion this year and close to $1 trillion next year. The six have signed $1.2 trillion of data center lease commitments, and more than $820 billion of that sits on leases for buildings that do not exist yet. Moody's still says a downgrade is not close. The agency itself frames this as a yellow flag.

Alphabet raised its 2026 capex guidance to around $200 billion and spent more cash in a quarter than it brought in for the first time in company history, and its shares fell about 7%. Meta generated about $32 billion in cash and spent $31 billion of it on data centers and chips, leaving $784 million against $8.5 billion a year earlier, and its shares dropped about a tenth.

Microsoft grew cloud revenue 43% past $100 billion a year, left spending plans unchanged, and added nearly $450 billion to its value the next day, the biggest one-day gain any company has recorded. Amazon raised its build budget to $220 billion, went cash flow negative by about $7.5 billion, and its stock rose 10% anyway on cloud sales growth of 37%, the fastest pace since 2021.

Alphabet and Meta absorbed the sharpest punishment for spending more than they earned. Microsoft absorbed none at all, and gained more in a single day than most companies are worth in total. When a ratings agency says unprecedented, what it means is, we have never had to grade anything like this.

Every gigawatt campus, every substation, and every cooling plant on the radar traces back to this same construction cycle. Whether your backlog holds up depends on how patient tech investors are feeling in any given quarter.

Your backlog on paper has not changed, but the ground underneath it has shifted significantly. BlackRock now owns more of that El Paso campus than Meta does, Moody's has put a number on how far outside normal the spending has grown, and Bedrock's machines are already earning real money without anyone sitting inside them. Whatever comes next, your client will not be the only one holding that risk.

If 70% of your backlog is data centers, ask who is really paying for it, and for how long.